Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

Certain people would have you believe that Queens of the Stone Age's third album, Songs for the Deaf, is the return of real rock — a bonecrushing work of boundless imagination, the cornerstone in a new era of great rock, much like Nevermind was a decade beforehand. These people, coincidentally, happen to be in the same group that criticizes the Strokes and the White Stripes, claiming that those two bands are nothing but hype, while shamelessly indulging in breathless hyperbole whenever they speak a single word about QOTSA. Anybody who heard Songs prior to its release claimed it was the greatest rock album in years, at least the greatest since Rated R, setting up expectations impossibly high for this very good album. To begin with, this ain't accessible — not because the music is out-there or unfamiliar (lots of Cream filtered through garage rock, prog-metal, album rock, and punk does not make one a Borbetomagus, nor does it make it "imaginative," either), but because it is so insular, so concerned with pleasing themselves with what they play that they don't give a damn for the audience. This extends to the production, which sounds like a stoned joke gone awry as it compresses and flattens every instrument as if it were coming out of a cheap AM car radio. Sure, that might be the point — the album begins with radio chatter, and there are lots of jokey asides by a fake DJ — but Deaf winds up being entirely too evenhanded and samey, since every guitar has the same beefy, mid-range, no-treble tone and Dave Grohl (aka the Most Powerful Drummer in the Universe) is pushed to the background, never sounding loud, never giving this music the muscle it needs. As such, it becomes tiring to listen to — too much at the same frequency, all hitting the ear in a way that doesn't result in blissful submission, just numbness undercut with a desire to have some texture in this album. Once you get around this — which is an effort; unlike, say, the Strokes' Is This It?, whose thin production worked aesthetically and enhanced the songs, this sound cuts QOTSA off at the knees — there indeed is plenty to enjoy here since the band is very good. They're exceptional players, especially augmented here by Grohl on drums, Mark Lanegan on vocals, and Dean Ween on guitar, plus they're very good songwriters, whether they're writing technically intricate riff-rockers or throwbacks to Nuggets. All of this is sorely missing from most guitar rock these days, whether it's indie rock or insipid alt-metal, so it's little wonder that so many fans of great guitar rock flock to this, regardless of its flaws. But that doesn't erase the fact that, above all, QOTSA is a muso band — a band for musicians and those who have listened to too much music. Why else did the greatest drummer and greatest guitarist in '90s alt-rock (Dave Grohl and Dean Ween, respectively) anxiously join this ever-shifting collective? They wanted to play with the prodigiously talented Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri, two musicians who share their taste and willingness to jam. It results in interesting music and an album that, for all of its flaws, is still easily one of the best rock records of 2002. But, to be needlessly reductive, the analogy runs a little like this — QOTSA is King Crimson and the White Stripes are the Rolling Stones. Which one is "better" is entirely a matter of taste, but which one do you think plays to a larger audience, and is more about "real" rock?

Kim Hughes, Amazon.com

Despite the advent of the '00s, thoroughly blunted longhairs wearing three-quarter-length T-shirts still boot around the suburbs in painted vans listening to roaring metal. Fittingly, a whole new crop of post-Dazed and Confused-era stoner rockers--Fu Manchu, Monster Magnet, and arguably the kings of them all, Queens of the Stone Age--provide a shredding contemporary score for righteous three-finger devil salutes. On Songs for the Deaf, core members bassist Nick Oliveri and singer-guitarist Josh Homme (also see Kyuss) balance pure guitar-induced carnage with more complex, though no less aggressive, speed rock that whips by so fast it creates its own breeze. Opening with the 90-second "The Real Song for the Deaf"--a cheeky and amorphous bit of bloopy electronica quite possibly recorded at the bottom of a swimming pool--the disc explodes with track two, a toxic squall of power chords and now-classic Olivera death howls. It's here the album's recurring concept/conceit is introduced as a generic-sounding announcer from L.A.'s "Clone" radio spits out some psychobabble reinforcing the tired if true cliché that commercial radio stinks. Similar mock broadcasts surface elsewhere, but they're easily forgivable, given the bounty on offer. Homme-powered tracks dominate--the lurching, weirdly springy "No One Knows" is a kind of "Monster Mash" for grownups; the vocal harmony-driven "The Sky Is Falling" is almost dreamy until a small army of guitars surges to the front lines to begin firing. And a lyrically winking hidden track, "Mosquito Song," is either an in-joke of ridiculous proportions or a declarative statement about the level of musicianship lurking just beneath the quaking veneer of the Queens' sound. Either way, genuine excitement comes early and often on Songs for the Deaf. It's a remarkable achievement--a hard rock record so good that it immediately evokes a conspiratorial fervor that makes you want to tell everyone you can about it. Er, job done.

David Sprague, Barnes & Noble

The problem with a lot of so-called "stoner rock" is that you actually need to alter your mind beforehand to get the most out of it. This high desert (no pun intended) combo, on the other hand, provide the mind-alteration itself, couching mysterious transporters somewhere deep in every gnarled tune. As on their last album, the critically acclaimed R, Queens of the Stone Age seldom merely stand in one place, bashing out stegosaurus-stunning riffs (although they're perfectly capable of doing just that when the need arises). Instead, Josh Homme and company have taken a wide array of spooky atmospherics and post-apocalyptic blues songs (some of the better ones, like "Hangin' Tree," sung by former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan) and assembled them into a pseudo-concept album designed to prove that, yes, modern popular culture is indeed as bad as you think. The songs are linked by announcements from a purposefully obnoxious disc jockey type (representing "Clone Radio"), but none of them -- from the creepy-crawly electronic burst "The Real Song for the Deaf" to the strangely catchy ghoul-pop nugget "No One Knows" -- would make it anywhere near airwaves controlled by such a bozo. Homme and Nick Oliveri seem more concerned with melody this time out, layering songs like "The Sky Is Falling" with harmonies that recall Agents of Fortune-era Blue Oyster Cult. But no matter how smooth the surface gets, the roots (and mocking humor) beneath, say, "You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, but I Feel Like a Millionaire" make for a dangerously thrilling undertow.

Queens Of The Stone Age: Johsn Homme, Nick Oliveri, Dave Grohl, Mark Lanegan. Additional personnel: Gene Trautmann, Dean Ween, Alain Johannes, Natasha Shneider, Chris Goss, Anna Lenchantin, Paz Lenchatin, Brendon McNichol, Molly Maguire, John Grove, Kevin Porter, Brad Kintscher. Producers: Josh Homme, Eric Valentine, Adam Kasper. Recorded at The Site and Barefoot, Hollywood, California. "No One Knows" was nominated for the 2003 Grammy Awards for Best Hard Rock Performance.

When one speaks of supergroups, alternative rock has seen its share of shining moments, from 1991's Temple Of The Dog to 1995's Mad Season. In 2002, the wheel spun around to Queens Of The Stone Age with SONGS FOR THE DEAF, their bid to save hard rock. While QOTSA founders Nick Oliveri and Josh Homme have often used a variety of players to round out their lineup, having Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters) make his return to the drum throne is cause enough to stop the presses. If that weren't enough, add former Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan and you've got all the ingredients for hard-rock greatness. Classic rock fans may recall with fondness the car-radio opening from Kiss' DESTROYER, paid tribute on opening track "Millionare" (SONGS is strung together with a series of similar radio station interludes). The vibe is set with fierce impact; requisite Sabbath-like riffs and T. Rex-from-hell swagger are the weapons of choice. Grohl sounds quite at home behind the drums, leaving double-bass drummers scratching their heads with his single-kick mastery in "First It Giveth." Be it undeniable vocal harmony ("Another Love Song"), balls-out psychedelic rock ("Song For The Dead"), or moody alt-rock grooving ("The Sky Is Falling"), SONGS FOR THE DEAF makes a strong case for rock album of 2002.

Amy Sciarretto, CMJ New Music Report, Issue 778, September 2, 2002

Queens Of The Stone Age get better with age. Songs For The Deaf is the band's third album and it clings steadfastly to QOTSA traditions, such as offbeat riffs and lyrics full of drug references. Guitar ace Josh Homme — who cut his teeth in Kyuss, widely accepted as stoner rock's undisputed royalty — continues to pound out monster jams and sing in his dreamy falsetto voice. Put-the-top-down numbers like "No One Knows" and "First It Giveth" are true to the QOTSA mission of undiluted, unrefined rock ‘n' roll, while the speed and oddity of "Song For The Dead" borders on punk rock. Songs For The Deaf picks up right where 2000's R left off. In a world marked by disorder, confusion and chaos, QOTSA's music is a comfort zone, thanks to its readiness to rock all night and party every day. Songs For The Deaf is peppered with obnoxious (and we mean that in a good way) sound bytes, so keep your ears primed for those.

Dear Queens of the Stone Age,

I am writing to you in the hope that I might be able to join your band. I've just got your new album, 'Songs For The Deaf', and I see you've got a new drummer, that bloke who used to be in the hairy band - Dave Grohl. Very loud, isn't he? And you've also got that grumpy fellow, Mark Lanegan, singing on some of the tracks. Cool.

I love the fact that the album is meant to be like a radio station. Very cool. And the way the first track, 'You Think I Ain't Worth A Dollar But I Feel Like A Millionaire', just fades in then WHAM it hits you in the face like a sonic missile. You're a bit of a nutter, aren't you, Mr Oliveri? It's the way you scream those words.

I know just what you mean on 'No One Knows' when you say "We get these pills to swallow/How they stick in your throat". Great imagery. And I love the riff on 'First It Giveth', like a kind of corkscrew drilling into your brain. And then grumpy bloke Lanegan does that sighing thing on the chorus like he used to do with Screaming Trees.

'The Sky Is Fallin' is a beast, with that deserty "We're all on acid" vibe that I can really relate to and those riffs, man, those riffs. Meaty. And what can I say about 'Hangin' Tree', it's got Mark Lanegan singing on it, it sounds like a great Screaming Trees song and it's got the word 'Tree' in the title. These. Are. All. Good. Things.

Sometimes you sound a bit more unhappy, like on 'Gonna Leave You' - "It's raining in my room" - I dig that. What about those drums on 'Go With The Flow' - man, that guy can play, can't he? I expect that's why you had him in the band. And 'God Is In The Radio' has got just such an awesome riff, like the Lord himself hotwired to a Marshall amp. Amen to that. And Mr Homme, your singing sounds so nonchalant, so nonchalant.

It sounds like you guys have such fun when you're making albums. And you make such great albums. And I love that Spanish DJ, oh yes. So, I was just wondering…could I be your new drummer? I'm thinking of getting a tattoo soon, if it helps.

Yours in rock,

Simon P. Ward

Kieran Grant, Toronto Sun / JAM! Music, August 24, 2002

Keee-runch! There's always been a pranksterish side to L.A. molten-rockers Queens Of The Stone Age, so one feels like a bit of a killjoy sending up the following flare, but nonetheless: Keep one hand on the volume control when testing their new Songs For The Deaf opus. Such preparation could prevent visits from the police and/or your being blown out of your rec room.

Suffice to say, there is an heroic upsurge in loudness within the disc's first three minutes.

Songs For The Deaf is the ambitious sonic depth charge Queens leader Josh Homme has been threatening to drop for years, and now he comes armed with the formidable Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters) to up the ante on drums.

Rather than struggle to harness the throb of their live show, the band devote their energy to unpredictability. So, alongside the gut-rattling You Think I Ain't Worth A Dollar But I Feel Like A Millionaire and Song For The Dead, they ricochet into splashes of sludge-pop such as No One Knows and the alarmingly sweet '60s psych-out Another Love Song.

Despite the raw power of the album's first half and its undercurrent of humour, it's this newfound direction that makes it worth wrecking your ears over.

John Robinson, New Musical Express

The myth is often so much better than the reality. It's great to hear about the excess, but the hangovers are less often recorded. Great to hear about the drugs, but less to hear about the dependency. Brilliant to witness the amazing rock'n'roll, much less brilliant to be present at the soundcheck.

The achievement of Queens Of The Stone Age is to do all three: be masters of the myth, deal with the reality, and be masters of their rock as well.

'Songs For The Deaf', their third album, finds them capitalising on this unique position, and nearly all of what you might want from them and their music is here. There are great titles ('You Think I Ain't Worth A Dollar But I Feel Like A Millionaire'), displays of extraordinary rock'n'roll ('A Song For the Deaf') and great disturbing pop ('No-one Knows'), and they all contribute to Queens' mystique. Having begun as a straightforward three-piece band, they're now something else altogether. Their world - sexual, drug-filled, and occasionally paranoid - has become progressively darker, and as such we find them nothing less than guardians of the rock flame.

It's an intoxicating story, and obviously one that's no less exciting to musicians. So here, joining full-time Queens members Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri are - once again - former Screaming Trees singer Mark Lanegan, and Dave Grohl. Importantly, these are the sort of people who have seen a lot and done a lot, but also those who are pretty consistently on top of their game. It's a dream team.

So a voice announces "I need a saga..." and, sure enough, one begins. Of course, it takes in what are for QOTSA some routine stops - pills, punk rock, dark humour and death - but 'Songs For The Deaf' is an album very aware that these in themselves are neither empirically interesting, or even anything new. 'No One Knows' and 'First It Giveth' stamp a dark mood on the record that never quite lets up - instead, it creates a woozy, disorientating world of sound that attempts to find the most innovative way possible of visiting signature rock subjects. There are still moments of release here (there's the great 'Gonna Leave You', 'Another Love Song' and the Lanegan-sung 'Hangin' Tree'), but the greatest achievement of 'Songs For The Deaf' is that it isn't an album that tells you what it was like - this is one that puts you right there.

To be there with Queens Of The Stone Age is definitely weird, but undeniably thrilling. It's the feel odd hit of the summer, and it's going to be very hard to beat.

Eric Carr, Pitchfork Media, September 11, 2002

Self-proclaimed prehistoric royalty Queens of the Stone Age are back from the desert wastes of California, and they're putting the 'rock' back in 'blowing shit up' (in a healthy, non-terrorist kind of way). Now, it's no secret that, when it comes to rock's metal edge, these Queens want badly to be kings; you need look no further for proof than 2000's blistering, thuggish Rated R, on which frontman Josh Homme's searing guitars and theatrical vocals brought the band close enough to their goal to sniff the fleurs de lis. That, however, is history, and with Songs for the Deaf, the Queens have hit a new peak in their development: the sound is more massive, the chaos is more calculated, and with hired gun Dave Grohl at the kit, the band has an unprecedented drive that leaves them poised for their strongest bid for power yet.

"You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire" embodies the greatest strengths of rock at its hardest-- stunning riffs, breakneck speed, and guitars that churn and spit like a threshing machine. It's riddled with decades-old metal cliches, but the Queens know what their audience expects, and they use this knowledge to continually twist rock stereotypes into a vicious full-nelson until they beg for mercy. It's fantastic, and this is just the first track.

"No One Knows" changes Songs for the Deaf's pace by sliding into an easy groove, sleazing its way across a dimly-lit bar, half-drunk and reeking of cheap cologne, to put the moves on your girlfriend (or, you know, you, depending). This is four-to-the-floor slime of the highest quality, folks, and it's the second installment in this album's triad of genius, completed subsequently by the next track, "First It Giveth". "Giveth" brings the drama like a champ, with Homme singing in pained falsetto over punishing riffs during the verses, and opening up into aggro-overdrive for the appropriately apocalyptic chorus.

But along the path to greatness, there are pitfalls, and one Homme often falls into here is the old "chamber of lost souls" effect (made popular by Alice in Chains on some of their later albums), which he uses to fill out the backgrounds of some of these songs. The multitracked Hommes aaah'ing melodramatically in undead unison make slogging through "Hanging Tree" and "Go with the Flow" a pretty grim endeavor. It doesn't help that these songs churn along interminably long after their riffs have run dry, either. And worse still, the band has quit winking at their metal excesses entirely, toeing the line between mindless fun and nü-metal gothery. Fortunately, this is only a temporary decline, but that these two tracks hit back-to-back in the dead center of the record makes for a much steeper dropoff than if they'd been sequenced farther apart.

There's also the issue of the between-song skits. As skits go, these are pretty tame, but that doesn't make them any less obtrusive. The album even opens with one: the sign-on of KLON (that's "clone") radio, "the station that sounds more like everybody else than anybody else." It's a broad parody of the Clear Channel wavelength empire, and while admittedly pretty fucking funny, the target is a bit obvious-- especially given that PS2's "Grand Theft Auto III" beat them to the punch two years ago and pulled it off expertly. My biggest problem with these interruptions, though, is that they do little for the aggregate effect of the album-- after a couple playthroughs, they only serve to stifle the momentum QOTSA manage to develop.

Yet, this same biting cleverness also pervades many of the songs, lending an air of spontaneity and plain good times-- there's a fake stop in one of the early tracks that's so ludicrous I laughed out loud. And there are even better moments to be had elsewhere: the wavering surf guitar on "Another Love Song", or the good old-fashioned brain-sickness of "Six Shooter" and "Mosquito Song," the latter played lovingly by what sounds like the orchestra of the damned.

When these guys are on, it truly is the wrath of the righteous. However, Songs for the Deaf vacillates constantly between soaring heights and mind-numbing lows, making for a true hit-or-miss affair. But even if they can't have it all, the guys do offer as real a showcase of metal-tinged panache and stellar songwriting as anyone might hope for from a band labeled 'stoner-rock.' Besides, if the entire album was as strong as the first three tracks, it'd probably burn you alive. As it stands, Queens of the Stone Age settle for attempted murder. And that ain't bad at all.

Arion Berger, RollingStone, issue 904, September 5, 2002

There comes a time in every band's life when it must accept its fate. For Queens of the Stone Age, that means embracing the old- (as opposed to new-) metal wrought-iron heart that beats at the center of the band's roomy melodies. Anointed as the new Nirvana in 1998, the California quartet was actually proof of how much the pop scene missed Nirvana. With Songs for the Deaf, the Queens get louder and weirder and let their bone-bred artiness run loose. This is prog grunge for the unpretentious, and it's funny as hell as the band settles into the arena-rock stylings that come naturally (singer-guitarist Josh Homme and bassist Nick Oliveri are two of rock's most elaborately accomplished musicians). The acid-rock-style "Millionaire" is a mild-mannered headbanger, as are the boogieish "Now One Knows" and "God." "Song for the Dead" has enough weighty speed metal to reanimate the subjects of its title.
The repetitive heavy pop of Queens' earlier work is manifest mostly in the second half of the album, on "Go With the Flow" and "Gonna Leave You," but only Homme and Oliveri would treat a power ballad such as "Mosquito Song" as if it were a folk tune, with guitar and plangent accordion giving way to a dignified march of strings, piano and martial drums. By emphasizing nothing -- vocals are growly and satanic or handsome and workmanlike as needed -- Queens push the songs themselves out front. Whether the ace metal is speedy or onerous (or both, as in the case of "Six Shooter," with its shrieking insanity), it is always deployed in the service of the eccentric song structures, and every track becomes a splendid, mysterious thing.

© Frank Steven Groen